Emotional intelligence

A Force for Good print/ebook and audiobook for will be available June 23, 2015. Sign up here to learn more about the Join a Force for Good initiative. Register for Dr. Goleman’s talk about A Force for Good on June 25 in Washington DC here.

There was only one thing that made the company’s sustainability practices look bad in the public eye: the little cups in which their machines brewed the coffee are made of plastic – a plastic that can’t be recycled.»

“Many people feel money is the source of a happy life. Money is necessary, useful—but more and more money does not bring happiness.”

Indeed, if people have enough income to handle life’s necessities (about $70,000 per year for the average family), studies find that additional money accounts for about one percent of their life satisfaction.»

I just heard from the Harvard Business Review that three of my articles will be in the new “Ten Must Reads” they are publishing – one on emotional intelligence. (Just between us, though, all of my HBR articles are available already in a single volume, What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters.)

Probably not. CNN recently posted an interesting video of Dr. Sanjay Gupta explaining what happens to the brain while multitasking. Gupta argues that we’re not actually doing two tasks at once; we’re diverting our attention from one task to work on another, and giving each just partial attention.

He references a study done on multitasking while driving. It showed that listening to sentences while driving decreased the driver’s attention to operating the car by 37%. So rather than listening and driving simultaneously, you’re offering each activity your reduced attention, resulting in substandard performance.

Do you wish there were more hours in a day? Does it seem like you have more tasks than time? I think we’ve all felt time-starved at some point, and unfortunately many of us experience this on a daily basis. I recently had an interesting conversation about this problem with my colleague, Elad Levinson, instructor for the upcoming Praxis You course, Thriving on Change.

Elad asked me, “Is there someplace where leaders should not focus their attention? You’ve talked about some of the ways in which leaders should focus. But are there places where the attention of leaders shouldn’t go, because it just doesn’t help?”

It got me thinking how leaders today are saddled with back-to-back meetings, conversations, phone calls, emails, texts… and it’s all happening at once!»

The willingness to admit your weaknesses and your vulnerabilities is actually very powerful. You can gain strength by admitting your faults to yourself and your peers. When you admit it, you make it a part of what we share as information about ourselves. It makes it okay for me to bring it up, which is crucial for working through conflict. You can even joke about it to ease tension. “You’re doing that thing again.”

But if you keep it to yourself or worse, are unaware of your own faults, then people don’t know what to do. You become the elephant in the room.»

The higher up the ranks you climb in an organization, the less honest feedback you receive from peers. And one common bit of advice many leaders could benefit from is, ironically, how to effectively deliver feedback to their team. I spoke with Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, for my Leadership: A Master Class about authentic leadership. Below is a snapshot of our conversation around cultivating a motivational culture versus a fear-inducing workplace.

I’ve always been interested in self-awareness as a leader’s capacity to take stock, to reflect, and to look at things defining a bigger perspective. But after I spoke with Claudio Fernández-Aráoz for my video series Leadership: A Master Class, I learned another reason why self-awareness is crucial for effective leadership. Here’s what Claudio had to say.

“We often think about self-awareness as the basis for developing our self-control, self-regulation, and social awareness. Our relationship management is based on those three clusters.

But self-awareness is also crucial for job allocation. Some people are outstanding for some jobs, and they are lousy for others.»

Crucial Competencies

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A Force for Good print/ebook and audiobook for will be available June 23, 2015. Sign up here to learn more about the Join a Force for Good initiative. Register for Dr. Goleman’s talk about A Force for Good on June 25 in Washington DC here.

There was only one thing that made the company’s sustainability practices look bad in the public eye: the little cups in which their machines brewed the coffee are made of plastic – a plastic that can’t be recycled.»